RCS Providing Conversational Interaction for Brands and Enterprises

While conceived over 10 years ago, the GSMA messaging standard, Rich Communication Services (RCS), has recently experienced a rebirth with the GSMA standard called the Universal Profile (UP). The UP has reduced the fragmentation and complexity of previous RCS iterations. And RCS is now poised to become a key messaging channel for conversational consumer engagement with brands and enterprises, leveraging business application-to-person (A2P) messaging, chatbots, and artificial intelligence (AI).

The SAP Digital Interconnect group offers a compelling set of API-driven communication services which enable enterprises to use a single service to integrate multiple communication channels and engage with consumers using the channel that best suits them. This is accomplished through ready-to-consume APIs enabled by the SAP® Live Link 365 mobile service and results in increased consumer engagement, satisfaction, and conversion.

The idea that RCS is “just another channel” is only partially true. Like many of the social messaging channels (or chat apps such as Facebook Messenger, WeChat, Telegram, and the like), RCS functions best in conjunction with a chatbot environment, enabling it to be a key or target channel – meaning a first choice for consumer engagement.

The RCS implementation from SAP Digital Interconnect will serve as an aggregation of multiple RCS MaaP APIs from RCS hubs as well as connections to individual operators and operator groups. For brands and enterprises, our RCS gateway solution will enable a consolidated API, leveraging SAP Live Link 365, which will also support a fallback channel – initially SMS but to potentially include other channels later. RCS will be another messaging channel that can be used to build various applications without having to build mobile apps.